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Sunday, June 23, 2013

The belief that people
have fixed, inherent abilities rather than being capable of learning from experience,
is responsible for much misery among screenwriters. So it’s worth debunking.

We screenwriters face specific challenges at various stages
of our work, both in the creative and business realms. But often the biggest
challenge we face are our own debilitating assumptions about talent or
potential. I recently came across a book called Mindset by psychologist Dr. Carol S. Dweck which
threw some very welcome light on this problem.

Do I really have to?

In my own
case, for example, rewriting is a problem. I hate diving back into a feature screenplay once I’ve ‘finished’ it. I want to leave it the
way it is and move swiftly on to the next project. The result is a growing pile
of well-written but unmarketable first drafts.

Mindset has
helped me understand the reasons for my reluctance to embrace the rewriting
process, and the insights are shockingly simple. Dweck distinguishes what she
calls a fixed mindset,ie the
conviction that things like intelligence and artistic ability are fixed quotas
you get at birth, and a growth
mindset, which says you can
develop abilities by learning from experience. Her book covers many different
areas of activity, but I find it resonates powerfully with some significant and
limiting misconceptions I often wrestle with as a screenwriter. Here are five
of them:

Misconception
#1: Effort Equals Failure

The thing I hate
hearing most in interviews with successful screenwriters is that they wrote
their first draft in one marathon writing session. The thing just rolled out onto the
page in five days, seemingly effortlessly.The reason that's annoying is
because it reinforces the idea that speed and lack of exertion are evidence of
great ability. After all, if you’re really good at something you obviously
don’t need to make an effort to produce great work. Conversely, the blood,
sweat and tears (not to mention time) needed by mere mortals like me just to come
up with a good idea or two, is proof of our inferior abilities. But as author Malcolm Gladwell
has explained in his best-seller Outliers, successful people in all kinds of fields
invest huge amounts of time and energy in perfecting their skills.

Just press for finished screenplay.

I love the example
of Thomas Edison in this context. There’s a popular mythology surrounding the
inventor of the light bulb that he was a natural genius who suddenly came up
with this brilliant idea and it worked. But in reality his invention was anything but effortless. He worked tirelessly for years, employed a team of scientists to assist him, tried
and failed many times before finally hitting on the right technology. He worked
systematically and learned from his mistakes.

Misconception
#2: Talent. You Either Got It Or You Don’t

This is an insipid and
highly demotivating trope that you find in all areas of human endeavour, from the
creative professions to business and academic work, but also in sports and entertainment.
The plethora of talent shows on TV bears witness to this idea that talent is a
trait you either have or don’t. But the reality of so many great athletes, artists, musicians, business people, etc., is that they spent many long
years developing and honing their skills before they became successful, and
continued to do so afterwards too.

Look, I can even play the guitar.

There’s a famous
anecdote about legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, who was once confronted by
someone who said something like: “Yes, but you’re black, it’s in your genes.”
To which Davis
replied that he had studied hard every day since he was a young boy, made a
superhuman effort to get into Julliard School of Music, and spent four years there
learning from the best possible teachers, while gigging in clubs at night. In
other words: He developed and nurtured his talent. It wasn’t a god-given,
pre-fabricated gift.

In fact, the
metaphor inherent in the use of the word ‘gifted’ in this context is telling:
Being gifted suggests you have been given something, an ability that has little
to do with you. It’s just something you have.

Misconception
#3: Failure Proves You’re Worthless

What is failure?
For example, a script you’ve written is rejected by agents and production
companies. Or: You get stuck on a script and abandon it. Or: Your screenplay doesn’t
place in a competition you’ve entered. Or perhaps your script is produced and
the resulting film is a flop and you’re blamed. Unfortunately, this kind of
failure is par for the screenwriting course. It’s unpleasant to experience
rejection, or be judged unfairly, but it only becomes a debilitating problem if
you believe rejection is evidence that you suck. A sure sign of this is when you
start apportioning blame and fantasizing about violent retribution (hey, write a story about it instead). Whereas, if
you believe that people can learn and improve from experience, then every
failure can be an important lesson too. It can point to specific aspects of
your writing or pitching skills that need improvement, enabling you to focus
your efforts more effectively next time.

You talkin' to me?

I have to admit
it’s quite unnerving to realize this about myself, because I like to think of
myself as a reasonable, fairly rational individual. Whereas this kind of
thinking is just so unhelpful, especially in a profession like screenwriting
where you are constantly confronted with rejection. It’s all very well learning
to “manage” rejection, but if deep-down you actually believe every rejection
proves your lack of ability, or conversely, that it demonstrates the subnormal
cognitive capacities of the rejecter, then you will never learn or improve.

Misconception
#4: You Consist Of A Fixed Set Of Traits

We’ve all heard
people say things like: Even as a toddler she was very musical. I’m just not a
maths person. He’s a born leader. I’m just not the creative type. And so on.
It’s a very common way of thinking about other people and about yourself, but in
reality people learn new skills, change jobs, emigrate, and learn from their
mistakes all the time. In her book, Dr. Dweck quotes numerous examples of
educational initiatives, projects with convicted criminals, different styles of
sports training, and much more, to demonstrate that often all it takes is a
shift in attitude away from this idea of fixed traits, to achieve significant
progress.

I sometimes wonder
if the phrase “I am a screenwriter” itself expresses this kind of belief. Most
people who are paid to write screenplays, do various other things too.
Especially considering that only a tiny minority of people who write
screenplays can live on doing only that. Most of us also have day jobs, earning
money with other forms writing such as copywriting, writing prose, playwriting,
journalism, and so on. I recently heard a published poet say she only considers
herself “a poet” while she’s writing a poem. I like that attitude.

Misconception
#5: Success Proves You’re Special

Even though it
feels a lot better than failure, success is just another great opportunity to
learn. Success can mean different things depending on where you are in your
screenwriting career (if there even is such a linear thing). It could be
something as simple as getting good feedback on a script, placing in a
screenwriting competition, or it might be landing a paid assignment, selling a
script, obtaining funding for your own production, etc. If you believe that
success is a sign of some special innate ability rather than of the effort you put into a
project, you make yourself vulnerable to inevitable subsequent
disappointments. Because the question then becomes: Where did my 'gift,' my ability go?

It’s like when a
child gets a good grade at school. The worst thing you can do as a parent is
suggest the success is evidence of some innate gift. You’re so clever. You’re
so musical. It’s much better to praise the kid for having worked hard. The same
goes for your own screenwriting success: Being aware of what you did to achieve
the success, helps you replicate it and improve on it in your next project.

All written with just my thumbs

For example, last
year my short script Happy New
Year was awarded production
funding by the Pears Foundation Short Film Fund and although I’ve written quite a
few short scripts, this one has received the best results so far. I’ve already
taken away plenty lessons from the experience, but one major one is: My writing
is at its best when I feel a strong emotional connection with the characters’
dilemmas, because that’s the fuel that helps me keep going back to script to
make it better and better. It moves my attention away from the idea that I have
to rewrite because my writing isn’t good, and channels it into the urge to
express what I set out to write as clearly as possible because it’s important to me.

I can’t possibly do
justice to Carol Dweck’s work here, so I would highly recommend reading
her book yourself. I’ve certainly learned a great deal from her, not just as a
screenwriter but also as a parent, a husband, a musician, and all the other
roles a person has.